Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
The statement of our subject in a text, was alluded to by the Christ
Church Lecturer, in a tone that at least approached to censure. But we
consider it amongst our privileges, that we can express our main
principles in the simple and obvious language of Scripture; and if in
this case deep scholarship and acute criticism be needed to give it to
common minds a meaning different from that in which we understand it,
the fault certainly is not ours.—Neither, indeed, is ours the blame, if
a similar phraseology pervades the whole Christian Scriptures; that in
every page we read of God and Christ, and never of God in three persons,
or of Christ in two natures. To find out such distinctions, we leave to
Scholastic ingenuity; to give them definition and perpetuity, we consign
to the framers of creeds and articles—and to receive and reverence them
we turn over to the admirers of Athanasian perspicuity. We take the New
Testament as the best formulary; we are satisfied with a religion direct
and simple in its principles, and we long not for a religion of
deducibles. We have been accused of tortuous criticism; and although we
desire not to retort the accusation on our opponents, so far I mean, as
it implies moral delinquency, we cannot forbear observing that the
intellectual sinuosities by which some of these deductions have been
drawn from the New Testament is to us, certainly, a subject of not a
little admiration. Our motive in selecting this text was the best of all
which governs men in the use of language, simply that with greatest
brevity and greatest perspicuity, it enunciates our opinions. Our
opponents, however, have no right to complain; the advantage of being
first in the field was on their side, and the struggle was not provoked
on our part but on theirs: they of course selected their own subjects,
and they suggested ours. They could, therefore, have had no uncertainty
either as to our views or interpretation of the text. I would not allude
to a matter so small, were it not for the contradictory delinquencies
with which Unitarians are accused—one time they are charged with
dreading an appeal to Scripture, and when by the very title of their
subject, they tacitly appeal to Scripture, there is wanting still no
occasion to blame.
What, in Unitarian views, is Christ the Man, and what is Christ the
Mediator, shall make the subject of the present Lecture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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